for people of a certain kind of twisted personality or temperament. They feel that they increase in stature if they humiliate others: I look big because I make you look small.

Those who have been victims

often turn out to be bullies themselves once they have achieved power of some kind; it is as if they are avenging themselves on their past tormentors by humiliating the unfortunate people who have now come under their power. They forget their own humiliation by humiliating others.

In Britain, Dalrymple notes, there is

a strange attitude. On the one hand it has never been as prevalent as now; on the other, we are hypersensitive to it.

Many branches of the public service have ‘anti-bullying’ policies. They

state that an employee has been bullied if he thinks that he has. When he makes an official complaint, he does not have to prove than his feeling is justified, only that he has felt it. He is the final authority on that. Anyone who is ticked off for not doing something can claim to have been bullied. This makes people wary of ticking anyone off, even when he has failed to do his job properly.

The anti-bullying policy

concentrates power in the hands of senior management, for it is they who have to adjudicate. At the same time, senior management are immune from claims that it is bullying precisely because it so successfully subordinates the hierarchy below. So two great classes are set up: not the rich and the poor, or the clever and the stupid, but the bullied and the bullies, or those who can be persecuted and those who cannot.

There is, Dalrymple points out,

no perfect solution to the problem of bullying. Legal prohibitions cannot eradicate it, nor can any number of organisations or policies. It is more a matter of manners than of law, and we live in a very bullying and intimidating social atmosphere. (You have only to watch behaviour at bus stops to realise this.) Increasing numbers of people think that power is the most, or the only, important relationship worth having with other people; so their criterion of how to behave is what they can get away with.

it came to light that police in Rotherham had for decades systematically turned a blind eye to the mass sexual abuse of children—at least 1,400 victims—by Muslim men.

He explains also that his British-born female Muslim patients tell him that school inspectors

never intervened when their parents prevented them from attending school, often for years. On the other hand, white working-class parents were bullied by those inspectors when their refractory 15-year-old daughters refused to go.

The British, writes Dalrymple, were once fond of their gardens, a reflection of love of the countryside. But in most of England’s streets today, gardens have been concreted over to accommodate cars, which are incomparably more important to Britishers than flowers or grass. This

transforms streets from pleasant locations into slums.

Anyone travelling through the countryside concludes that the British

regard it not with veneration but as a litter bin, into which they throw the wrappings of their vile and incontinent refreshments. (They are the fattest people in Europe as well as the most slovenly.)

Local government

believes it has more important things to do than keep streets clean: not only does it have to use a growing proportion of its income to pay the unfunded pensions of past workers, but it has to develop anti-discrimination policies and rectify the natural consequences of the personal improvidence of so large a proportion of the population.

The corruption of England’s public administration

is very great: public employment is largely divorced from the production of any public good.

Dalrymple points out that the educational level in Britain is

appallingly low: 17% of British children leave school barely able to read and write, though $100,000 each has been spent on their education. How is such a miracle possible?

It is extremely unlikely that any of these problems will ever be tackled, because the obvious measures that are necessary

would have to be carried out by the very cadre which has inflicted such terrible damage and which combines ideological malevolence with practical incompetence in everything except the acquisition of power.

A faceless international bureaucracy will never replace the nation state

Britain, Dalrymple points out,

has a very different (and incompatible) political and legal tradition from that of the rest of Europe.

Moreover,

people need a sense of identity rooted in land and culture, and not just in an abstract idea. There may be some citizens of the world who feel equally at home anywhere, but they are few, and the majority of people feel a need for some kind of physical and cultural rootedness. The most satisfactory way of finding such rootedness in the modern world, that permits both freedom and a degree of democratic control, is via the nation state. It commands loyalty, affection and a sense of duty to a degree that no other polity does. It has its deformations, but it gives its citizens a sense that the polity under which they live is theirs and is capable of responding to their concerns.

By contrast,

a faceless international bureaucracy, composed of superannuated politicians of a variety of countries, clinging to unelected power and influence like limpets to a rock, will never replace the nation state in the affections of most people.

more comprehensively surveyed as they go about their daily business than the poor Soviets ever were.

The surveillance

is intended not to protect or deter, but to intimidate.

There is in Britain, he notes,

a nomenclatura who wield great and irresponsible power, whose life is distant from that of the great majority of citizens. As in the Soviet Union, they do not own the state institutions in which they work, but they have the usufruct of them. Their privileges are wildly out of proportion either to their merits or to the privileges that others enjoy. The first-class carriages of trains, for example, are almost exclusively for their use.

Sovietisation

Dalrymple points out that England has become

a propaganda state. No matter what economies are imposed on those parts of the public services that deliver services to the public, there is always time enough and money enough in state institutions for the production and distribution of glossy propaganda to the workers who receive it compulsorily (for they are never asked whether they want it or not).

As in communist countries, the purpose of the propaganda

is not to persuade, much less to inform, but to violate the probity of the recipient, who has neither the energy nor the courage to protest against its lies, and therefore becomes in some way complicit in them. The more untrue the propaganda is, the more at variance with the lived experience of those who are subjected to it, the better, for the more completely it destroys the integrity of the recipient, rendering him docile.

Therefore, at the very time when hospitals are under threat of closure,

the staff receive glossy handouts portraying them as happy and smiling, at one with the management, just as Soviet peasants were portrayed feasting at tables groaning with produce at the height of famine.

There is

a constantly-changing langue de bois used by the hierarchy of public institutions, to disguise the reality. Words no longer have tolerably fixed meaning, but must be construed in their dialectical sense. Experience teaches, for example, that when the chief executive of an NHS institution says, ‘I am passionately committed to x,’ he means x is about to be disbanded or closed down, and about time.

Careless talk costs careers

An atmosphere of fear stalks Great Britain, says Dalrymple.

People are reluctant to speak their minds, even if what is in their minds is by no means outrageous. Whole subjects, some of them of great national importance, are beyond the pale of acceptable discussion. In the public service, underlings are afraid that their superiors might get to hear anything that contradicts the latest ideological doctrine, or that fails to use the latest accepted terminology, and that they might suffer.

Professionals have to take part in many fraudulent

ceremonial procedures, such as endless meetings of a semi-political nature, and perform bureaucratic tasks ever more intellectually corrupt and disconnected from the real goal of their work, compliance with which destroys their probity and turns them into ciphers.

Failure to protest

induces a state of self-hatred and contempt.

The best

go into inner emigration, and withdraw from public life completely.

The worst

join the apparatchiks.

Careerism, cronyism and looting of the public purse

Who is to blame for the Sovietisation of British life? Dalrymple explains that Margaret Thatcher played a large part.

Not only did she give the impression of being an economic determinist, a mirror-image Marxist, and not only was she a great centraliser, giving an impetus to the most ruthless forms of careerism and its corollary, cronyism, but she vastly increased the role of supposedly technocratic management in society, and particularly in the public service. She thought that professional managers were the way to control the vested interests of professions and public servants; in the process she created the new nomenclatura, with vested interests that dwarf all previous vested interests, and a looting of the public purse such as has not been seen for two centuries.

The Labour party,

to do it justice, saw its opportunity presented to it on a plate by the Conservatives. Trained in dialectics by those (many) among them with communist pasts, they read the situation with some subtlety. Not nationalisation, but a permanent revolution of ever-changing regulation, favour-swapping with big business, bureaucratic reorganisation, and the proliferation of parastatal bodies was the road to eternal power and the spoils it brought with it.

In the process,

the freedom and independence of the citizen had to be destroyed: a small price to pay, since they never valued it in the first place.

Dalrymple does not expect to see the Sovietisation reversed in his lifetime,

at least not without a cataclysm: and that might bring us something very much worse.

obviously low general level of education, which you can see just by walking in the street.

It is very glaring from the moment he arrives in England (he lives much of the time in France). There is

a determined, ideological quality to the evident low cultural and educational level.

One finds in Britain

deliberate crudity, vulgarity and stupidity

lack of refinement of any kind

inability or unwillingness to learn even so simple a matter as how to address strangers with reasonable civility (all the more devastating in an economy that is highly dependent on the provision of services)

For this reason, Dalrymple explains, England will, whatever its level of unemployment,

continue to have to import labour if it wants to have simple services that work with tolerable efficiency. If you don’t believe me, I suggest you go to a large hotel with only a British staff. It’s amusing in a way.

England will continue to have to import labour if it wants to have simple services that work with tolerable efficiency

has enormous cultural problems, perhaps only to be expected in a country in which more than 50% of children are born out of wedlock and 20% do not eat a meal with another member of their household more than once every two weeks. A dangerously high and perhaps unsustainable proportion of the population is unfitted for productive life in a modern economy, having attained an abysmally low educational level despite (or because of?) considerable state expenditure. This section of the population is not merely indifferent to refinement of any kind – intellectual, æsthetic or of manners – but actively hostile to it. Similarly, it is not merely not anxious to learn, it is anxious not to learn.

to perform tasks in its service industries that ordinarily one might have expected its large fund of indigenous non-employed people to perform. Although these tasks require no special skills, they require certain personal qualities such as reliability, politeness, and willingness to adapt: and these the eligible local population lack entirely. No hotel-keeper, for example, would consider using British labour if he could get foreign.

Perhaps nothing, says Dalrymple, captures the levels of personal incompetence and lack of self-respect in Britain

than the fact that young men of the lowest social class are about half as likely to die in prison as they are if left at liberty. In prison, though adult, they are looked after, at least in a basic way, and told what to do. They are no longer free to pursue their dangerous and crudely self-indulgent lifestyle, in which distraction is the main occupation. In prison they receive the healthcare that, though it is free to them under the NHS, they are not responsible enough to seek when at liberty.

In short, Dalrymple observes,

they do not know, because they have never been taught, how to live in a minimally constructive fashion, though they were certainly not born ineducable.

Other comparable countries have similar problems, but none

has them to anything like the same extent.

He points out that these problems do not originate from Britain’s membership of the European Union,

nor will they be solved by exit from the Union. They can be solved only by something more resembling a religious revival than by any likely government action.

But

expecting a population to bethink itself while simultaneously being offered political solutions that require no effortful cultural change is unreasonably optimistic. And politicians are unlikely to be frank about the problem for two reasons: first because alluding to the deficiencies of their electorate is probably not the best way to get elected, and second because it downgrades the providential role of politics, which politicians are understandably reluctant to do.

has become among the least disciplined nations known to me in the matter of making a noise, and the most ferocious in its defence of its own egotism. The English, it used to be said, took their pleasures sadly; now they take them loudly. As they walk through the streets in pursuit of their generally gross and unrefined pleasures, or after they have taken them, they scream and shout fit to wake people on life-support machines in a vegetative state. The women are worse than the men, or at least their voices are more penetrating.